As a child, he lived with his mother in the White House during
World War II with President and Mrs. Roosevelt, his grandparents.
His parents divorced in 1949, and his father committed suicide the
following year. His mother remarried Dr. James Addison Halsted on
November 11, 1952.

Later, as a college student (Amherst College), he lived and traveled
with his grandmother Eleanor Roosevelt and joined her in
work on behalf of the United Nations. He served as national
president of the Collegiate Council for the United Nations
from 1958 to 1960.

Boettiger served for 20 years as Professor of Human Development
at Hampshire
College in Amherst, Massachusetts, of which
he was founding faculty member. He created and was chairman of
Hampshire's interdisciplinary Human Development Program. Leaving
Hampshire to work with graduate students in clinical psychology, he
was Professor of Psychology and Dean of Student Affairs at the
California School of Professional Psychology in San Francisco and
Berkeley, California.

He is Vice-President and Treasurer of the Christopher Reynolds
Foundation, on whose board he has served for over 30 years. Trained
as a political scientist at Columbia University before moving
to a career in psychology, he taught at his alma mater Amherst
College, was a consultant to and member of the Social Science
Department of the RAND Corporation,
and briefly served as a desk officer at the United States Department
of State. He holds a Ph.D in clinical and developmental
psychology.

Earlier in his career, Dr. Boettiger wrote on educational and
political themes, including two books on United States policy in
Vietnam. He has an interest in the intersections of social history,
narrative and psychology, themes explored in his biography of his
parents' lives: A Love in Shadow, published by W.W.
Norton.

John Roosevelt Boettiger lives in Norway and consults at Modum
Bad Psychiatric Center in Vikersund, Norway. He has four
children

Adam Boettiger

Sara Boettiger

Joshua Boettiger

Paul Boettiger

and seven grandchildren. He is married to Leigh McCullough, Ph.D, who is Clinical
Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard
Medical School and Director of the Research Institute, Modum Bad
Psychiatric Center, Vikersund, Norway.